Faded Jeans Living

Give yourself some grace.

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“I’m the first me. And you are the first you. And if we bravely live as our authentic essence, we are first.”
— Worthy: How to Believe You Are Enough and Transform Your Life, Jamie Kern Lima

That quote from Jamie just kind of blew my mind.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized how true it is.

This is my first time being Dwight Hyde.

Everything I’m seeing, everything I’m doing, every relationship I’m having, every situation I’m encountering—it’s happening in real time. I’m experiencing it, taking it in, learning from it, and moving forward with whatever I know at that moment.

And then I realized: that’s true for every one of us.

This is your first time being you.

There has never been another you.

Think about that for a minute.

Everything that has happened in your life has helped shape the person you are today—your family, relationships, environment, experiences, successes, failures, the things you were taught, the things you figured out on your own, and the things that happened to you that you had no control over. It’s all part of the equation.

And at every point along the way, you only knew what you knew up to that point.

Sometimes we tell ourselves, “I should have learned that from the last time.”

But maybe we didn’t. Maybe we thought we had learned it, but the wisdom hadn’t taken root yet. Sometimes it takes another experience, another mistake, or another opportunity to see something we couldn’t see before.

That doesn’t mean we failed. It means we’re still learning.

So why are we so damn hard on ourselves?

Why do we expect ourselves to have known then what we know now?

We’ve never done this before.

None of us has.

And that’s why the second part of Jamie’s quote matters:

“If we bravely live as our authentic essence, we are first.”

We can spend our lives becoming a version of ourselves shaped by everyone else’s expectations. Or we can have the courage to discover what is actually true for us—and live from that place.

That brings me a surprising amount of peace and relief.

So when you catch yourself being especially hard on yourself, maybe stop and ask:

Is this the first time being you?

Give yourself some grace.

And knowing this, give others that same grace. They’re experiencing life for the first time, too.

— Dwight

I haven’t finished Worthy yet, but what I’ve read so far has really connected with me. There’s a lot in this book that has made me stop, think, and look at myself a little differently.